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Written by Vasudev Das
New York and New Jersey (27-28 June)
Maharaj left Gita Nagari early on Saturday morning (27 June), because he had a preaching program scheduled at 26 2nd Ave in the … more

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How Important are Memories of The Temporary

17 Feb 2011 -

How important are memories? Some people are controlled by their memories for their whole life. It’s like here, I met somebody of 40 years who was just still remembering that he had a bad time in school, and I go:

“Okay, that’s bad. That’s really bad, I feel for you. I do, I do, but how old are you?!”
“Forty.”
“Okay, Forty, Right?
“Yeah.”
“And when was school? Are you sure you can still remember?”
It’s like … well, I didn’t have that much fun in school either, but at the age 57, it doesn’t exactly… I don’t feel much connection with school at this stage – I can hardly remember. A few grey memories of my school days, and it was maybe not so much fun. I remember that. I remember, it was not so much fun. Fun was not allowed in school, that I remember. So I didn’t like school that much. But it’s behind us. So much is behind us.

So memories, why make so much of memories?
“I have such beautiful memories…”
You have such beautiful soap bubbles!
“Beautiful… My beautiful memories, I will never forget.” Okay, but it’s finished now. It’s over. Gone! And they’ll never come back. Sorry! So why make so much of it? That’s material life. At the end, there’s just some memories left. If you’re lucky! You may remember that I told about the man with the t-shirt, “Seen it all, heard it all, done it all, but can’t remember it all!” I congratulated him!
I met him on an airport and congratulated him and — I said:

“Wow, that’s a great t-shirt!”
He said, “You like it?”
I said “Yes!”
He said, “I made it myself.”
I said, “Deep! Deep… Very deep!”

Right? It’s a fact! So let’s see how much we can still remember at the end. So we’re speaking about the temporary. Why invest so much in that? It’s so obvious that when we begin to invest in Krishna consciousness then it gets very nice, because there’s eternal spiritual benefit in whatever we do, and whether the temporary part is okay or not, that is secondary.Like here, whether the program is boring or whether the program is exciting, right? That is secondary. You can say: “Ah, it was a great program! It was just so dynamic and so exciting and so interesting and everything and then the prasadam, it tasted so nice!” But how long will you remember that? What is really important is the eternal benefit even if it was a terrible program!

One of those programs that were like, everything went wrong – “Kirtan was terrible”
“The lecture was *yaaawn*’”, and then
“The prasadam… the rice wasn’t cooked!”
“Too much salt in the dahl!”
“The subji… It was hard.”
“Oh God… And the sweet rice was burnt.”
“It was a great program!…” “Yeah, it was a really great program”

Well, at least the eternal side was okay. At least the eternal side was still alright. So that’s there, we always have these two elements. The eternal side and the temporary material side. And of the two, the eternal benefit, that’s the most important.